Rep. Steve King: Obama Must 'Come to Congress' to Make ObamaCare Changes

On Wednesday, Rep. Steve King (R-IA) said, “If President Obama wants to make changes to ObamaCare, he must come to Congress.”

King confronted the Obama administration on its decision to illegally delay enforcement of the employer mandate of the president’s signature health care legislation until 2015 – after the 2014 midterm elections.

“President Obama has no constitutional authority to amend his own bill,” King asserted. “He has no constitutional authority to simply waive the law. No matter Obama’s determination to suspend his own law, only Congress can do so.”

Two years ago, the Obama Administration, through a memo from a Homeland Security Department bureaucrat, declared it would not enforce our nation’s immigration laws. Now the Obama Administration, through a blog post by an Assistant Secretary in the Treasury Department, is declaring it won’t even enforce its own health care law on employers.

We live in a Constitutional Republic. We are a nation governed by laws written by Congress, not memos and blog posts written by bureaucrats.

The mandate, a central provision of ObamaCare, requires employers with at least 50 full-time employees – workers who average 30 or more hours per week – to provide health insurance. It was scheduled to go into effect on January 1, 2014, and established fines, to be paid to the IRS, for employers that did not comply with it.

On Tuesday, a Treasury Department spokesperson announced that the employer mandate provision of ObamaCare will be delayed for one year. The individual mandate, requiring all Americans to purchase health care insurance, or else pay a “tax,” as defined by the Supreme Court, and the HHS mandate, requiring most religious employers to provide free contraception, sterilization procedures, and abortion-inducing drugs to its employees, are apparently not delayed.

Though the Affordable Care Act, known as ObamaCare, was billed to Americans as a panacea that would bring down the costs of health insurance as it insured millions more people, it remains widely unpopular with American voters.

White House adviser Valerie Jarrett said on Wednesday, “We will convene employers, insurers, and experts to propose a smarter system and, in the interim, suspend reporting for 2014.”